Hunting Food: Luxury or Necessity? Does Air count?

Remember this:  Interpretation is 9/10ths of the law of reading anything. Always give each reading a careful inspection. Once you eat the food, the food is gone. You have to find more ad nausium.

Jezebel Magazine posted an article by Jeanna Sauers entitled, What Does It Mean For Food To Be A Luxury?   In which the reporter explores a fashion spread that appears in I Love You magazine’s Diet issue by Elle Muliarchyk . Sauer says that this article by I Love You magazine explores the idea of food as a luxury. Given the interpretation that Elle Muliarchyk translates from her ideals into photography and the requirements of the people commissioning the work there are always underlying themes with critical world views, personal sentiment, and negative visions that could broaden the horizons of magazine readers while initating the existance of old outdated ideals of food that aren't helpful.
Think it through. Think it through long and hard.

I perused both Sauer’s article and I Love You magazine’s spread to investigate what a female who hunts would think about this two way street of opinions. I will also admit in the realm of art you can get away with creative murder and come out unscathed. Art can also be your bouncing board to solve emotional, social, or psychological problems if not deal with them. Art can be a platform to bring much deeper issues to the forefront  in a roundabout way when different groups do not want or will outcast those not of the same mindset. That is what I like about art. Art is revolution in your face while you’re trying to figure it out.

My previous posting was one of hunter’s living in a tough economy on limited meat/food supplies but yet here I stare at my monitor. I also want to interject that looking at this from a realist Hunteress’s view of hopefully non-biased opinions or observation that I can actually make sense of ‘what lays before me on my plate’.

Is food a luxury? Especially for a huntress/hunter?

I would ponder loosely but unrealistically, food is a luxury on one hand because it is readily available in unnumbered quantities where waste is not an issue. Is this a realistic thought? No. Food is a necessity. When food is treated as a luxury that would mean it is limited. Wild game meat could be considered a luxury because it is limited by law governed hunting seasons and biological ecosystem changes. There is not enough wild game meat to go around or sustain a huge population unless someone starts farming it. If they start farming wild game then it is not really wild over time domestication, hormones, and that special sauce they start adding will change the meat and animal itself. Wild game that is not up for the hunt but is outlawed because of low quantities are especially targeted by greedy thieves of peril.  That is why  the Black Market exists, which is not limited to food but covers a host of bear paws, gall bladders, human kidney transplants, or your mother’s sink if there is some value to it or if it’s not bolted down.

If food sources are limited the price tag goes up because of low availability given breeding or growing seasons and the charges that go with it for acquiring, processing, shipping, more processing, self-preparation or professional prepared to serve. I could consider the fact there are some food that you can't get unless you go across the Great Pond because shipping laws do not allow it to enter your country.

I looked at a couple of the photos. I do acknowledge that they are trying to be provocative.  I would hope that there is a fine line between provocative and sexual. Maybe Muliarchyk should have removed the sexual connotations from the photos but would the photos have had the same meaning? Maybe for that photo there was a sexual undertone for it? Sexual tones are in all sorts of media where the hidden meaning is washed out by the sex. Keep it in context I say. To be provocative would mean to incite some kind of emotional respond even if that one is of disgust, repulsion, or totally nirvana.  I would say that one photo of a bare breasted woman holding sausage has the reek of sex sales. “Gimme your salome” comes to mind and the photo where the model has an almost orgasmic face could be conveyed as this “totally disgusts me” or “let us go Google weird octopi sex on the internet”. The only one I saw that comes close to the theme of food being a luxury is the pose of the model with the hog head where she looks like she is going to sleep satisfied  which is usually what people do after eating: go to sleep. I am kind of put out the photographer left out the apple. That would have been so cliché.

In Sauer’s article she contends Muliarchyk ate a random sampling of odd foods over her life which gives us a sense of her food palette and the fact she ate her own shoes in a Soviet-style children’s camp. I wondered why someone would send a child out to learn to eat her own shoes if she needed to? Muliarchy even states she hunted for her food.

Her words and actions are also telling of a person who doesn’t have a constructed limit to what she feel is her personal identity as it pertains to food because of the influences much like social trends on eating behaviors.   Then again it could be a trick of the eye. She is telling us what she sees the public doing or the Fashion world. She is just now doing it so let us support her exploration of that. Think Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride when she couldn’t even commit to the kind of cooked egg she wanted. She just assimilated her male counterpart’s likes and dislikes. Muliarchyk might be trying to incite the readers into questioning their own beliefs and perceptions on food. I assume these things as part of my exploration of the theme of food and how it is presented by Elle Muliarchyk.

Maybe Muliarchyk is finally fighting against the stream of information that is coming at her to measure her food identity or relationship both emotionally and personally? Then again she could be trying to form the topic of trading starvation for a modeling career where the models are really meat sacks prostrated lovingly out on a spread where she once appeared? Or is that how she views models through the lens of her camera? As cattle or human meat being moved for consumption? I would wonder if there is some resentment and underlying anger in her for depriving herself or seeing others do it in erroneous ways which over time could cause all kinds of distortions where they related to different needs in life.

The photographer also contends that the relocation to the US changed her eating style based on her employ where it has been known in the modeling world to cause extremist attitudes and behaviors amongst models towards food. It’s the love/hate mentality. I love you, want to eat but if I do food will make me fat so I hate you because I deprive myself for a paycheck. This made me also ponder the notion of people living in our day and age working and getting a paycheck to watch it go to known non-food items such as rent where they hate the fact they don’t make enough money to buy food. I hate where I live because I am starving for food. It’s the resentment issue again. The model would have the financial access but the Regular Joe doesn’t have the financial access to eat either. Both are hungry but in different ways. Ways we tolerate in ourself and other people because they do the best they can or do they? Is it a fantasy to think we are not really limited?

I thought of what could these images convey because art is about personal interpretation but it has to be meaningful or else it is just another Crayola picture on the wall. By the way, there are no bad Crayola pictures in existence.

I perused the I Love You magazine’s web page where the photos are based around a center model  with her legs wide open, lace see through underwear while eating some article of food with hints of oral fixations. I almost was taken aback by the similar XXX images of women in prostrated sexual positions where bodily fluids are rendered while on Googling runs for images that are not sex related.  I was reading one part of an article introduction that read, “it’s not about surviving as much as it is about longevity. Not about the quantity but the quality.”

With this my personal belief is life is about survival. If you can’t survive you can forget about longevity. You can have quality food but it better be sustainable and in volume. If it’s not then once you eat food, the food is gone. You have to find more. Sometimes you can have quality food. You just have to have enough of a quantity to go around to feed the people until someone can grow, hunt, or forage a field be it city or country to provide.

There was also the wordage of “food is the new status symbol” on I Love You’s magazine page. If you have food then you must have money to burn or the EBT card. Which I have known a lot of EBT card holders that only get enough for about fifteen days of food if they are not rigorously measuring out portions, stealing ornamental cabbage from the bank flower bed, dumpster diving or begging for a hand out as working people would call it but that is for another article. You can’t really think about proper nutrition when you are hungry and have limited resources. You just need to feel satisfied until the next stomach growl or hunger pang.

To me there are a couple of mentalities but I am not ruling out ones I don’t know about where people are dissociated from food. The first one is a Regular Joe working or unemployed for the man trying to feed his family with limited resources.  This person is probably not going to be concerned with metabolic processes, the next self-help book, or even magazine articles where people rant about food like it’s a luxurious option to eating  air. This person is going to be out there working on his primitive hunter-gatherer mentality because that is what is going to feed the family: effort with results. Second there are the groups that look down their noses at food compromised individuals with contempt because they have all or some food that is available or feel they are entitled because they worked a little harder. I say you have food false security because poverty hasn’t hit you yet.  If you want to complain give that unemployed person your job. See how that feels.

In conclusion I enjoyed both articles because it opens up the exploration for how I feel about food and its issues from the perspective of a person who hunts. These magazines or 'worlds' being outside the swamps and rivers I burden with my presence. I do believe the issue is the same. How do I see my food? How do I feel about it? Is it wrong, right or neutral? Can I change my view? Can other people understand or tolerate my food ethic? These are the questions I asked myself.

I have to support Sauer and I Love You magazine because they are bringing an issue to light that we all should be thinking or better yet doing something about. Food is what keeps us going but the parameters that define our access to food from its sources such as economical or social, dictate how we view food accessiblity then we act accordingly.

Talking is only talking for so long if it doesn’t solve or alleviate a problem.  As a creative person I do not want to actively tear another’s views apart but only share my own to make sense of the bigger whole. As a person who hunts food is very important and may have a different meaning in terms of availability or even how I treat the meat. Either way it is definitely going in my stomach at some point. I can’t live without it or does air count?

Written By:  W Harley Bloodworth
~Courtesy of the AOFH~